BPC-DP: Penn COMP-ACT: A College Service Learning Course to Promote and Increase COMPutational Thinking and ACTivities in Afterschool and Summer Programs

University Of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia PA

Investigators

Abstract

The University of Pennsylvania proposes to develop and deploy a new CS service-learning course at the college level which will be integrated with the cascading mentoring of high and middle school students. The course - called College Service Learning Course to Promote and Increase COMPutational Thinking and ACTion (Penn COMP-ACT) - will train college students to teach K-12 computational activities. Penn COMP-ACT undergraduates will learn about computational thinking, and then they will teach and mentor high school and middle students in coordinated summer workshops and afterschool programs. The high school students will be engaged to work with the middle school students as well. This "learning-by-teaching" approach will improve all of the student's understanding of computational thinking and purposes by exposure to a variety of hands-on software design activities and materials. The Penn COMP-ACT course leverages several prior successful efforts including a pilot service-learning course set up in the CS course program, and the existing partnerships and programs within CS and Penn to recruit girls and minorities from the local community. It will be lead by an interdisciplinary team of computer scientists, computer science and K-12 educators.